South Whatcom Fire Authority emergency responders may stop assisting people injured or in distress on Galbraith Mountain and other recreation areas if the county and city don’t reimburse the agency for responding to calls outside its jurisdiction.
“We are aware of the public perception and possible risks out there that can come out of a lack of service if an agreement isn’t reached, but we’re doing this out of fiscal responsibility to our taxpayers, to make sure we can provide services to them,” SWFA Fire Chief Mitch Nolze said during a January interview.
Starting in summer 2023, SWFA leadership became concerned it was diverting too much manpower away from the taxpaying residents of the South Whatcom service area, which spans unincorporated communities from Geneva to Lake Samish, while responding to calls of injured mountain bikers on Galbraith and Lookout Mountain, imperiled boaters on Lake Whatcom and stranded rock climbers in the Chuckanuts.
After more than a year of fruitless discussions about payment for services, on Dec. 20, 2024, Nolze sent a letter to Whatcom’s county executive, the county council, the mayor of Bellingham, the Whatcom Mountain Bike Coalition and Washington State Parks, alerting them that SWFA intended to begin the process of ending its out-of-jurisdiction response if no agreement was reached.
Nolze describes the recreation areas as “no man’s land.” According to the county’s fire district map, they fall outside of any local fire district’s purview. They are technically in Whatcom County’s jurisdiction, so emergency response could be the responsibility of the county’s various volunteer search and rescue organizations, which operate under the sheriff’s office.
SWFA started tracking calls outside of its jurisdiction — by November 2024, the agency had responded to 54 incidents in recreation areas that year, spending more than 80 hours total on those incidents. Those calls can be time-consuming and manpower intensive.
Local government officials working on solution
Whatcom County deputy executive Kayla Schott-Bresler, who has been working on the issue since she was appointed to the position, said it’s more complicated than it might seem to a casual observer. She has tried to find analogous situations around the state without success.
“There are a lot of really interesting policy and equity questions I think we need to ask,” Schott-Bresler said. “Why is there a coverage hole? Does this require a state law change? Should emergency response be privatized in these areas?”
Galbraith, more so than the Chuckanuts (most of which is state park or county park) or Lookout Mountain (county park and private timberland), is an unusual beast: a heavily used recreation area on a patchwork of public and private land in the unincorporated county, within a city-owned easement. SWFA has a station on Samish Way, minutes from the entrance to Galbraith, and crews have responded to calls there since before mountain biking became a major economic driver in the region.
Recreation on Galbraith exploded after the City of Bellingham and Whatcom Land Trust secured a recreational and conservation easement on the working tree farm in 2018.
The Galbraith Mountain Management Plan, signed by the city and Galbraith Tree Farm, states the city will meet with SWFA and the county fire marshal annually or as needed to review emergency and fire procedures, but Nolze said the fire authority was not aware it was mentioned in the plan and has not had annual meetings with the city.
The city has not responded to requests for comment.
While professional medical assistance is generally considered a privilege, not a right, in remote recreation areas, users might be under the impression that EMTs are readily available for incidents on Galbraith, which is easily accessed by a network of logging roads and dotted with emergency checkpoints (implemented by SWFA) to help first responders locate injured parties.
In September 2024, Nolze proposed reimbursements for SWFA services rendered in 2023: $234,144 from the city for Galbraith calls and $82,926 from the county for calls to Lookout Mountain, the Chuckanuts and Lake Whatcom.
Nolze determined the cost by totaling up how many hours of service time SWFA crews spent out of their jurisdiction in 2023. The number does not include fire-related calls because the fire authority has an agreement with the state Department of Natural Resources for joint fire protection. Then Nolze applied the percent of time spent out of jurisdiction to the total annual operating budget, which primarily supports 911 response times. Nolze anticipates that number going up in the future because of increasing call volumes and budgetary considerations.
No agreement yet with fire authority for payment
The governments have not yet reached an agreement with the fire authority to pay for services. Nolze said he’s open to creative solutions, but at the end of the day he doesn’t feel it’s the fire authority’s job to facilitate negotiations between the county and city or help them secure funding.
“We certainly encourage the mountain bike community to talk to their representatives if they feel it is appropriate,” Nolze said. “We recognize a need for services and don’t intend for it to fall by the wayside. We’ve hoped all along to reach an agreement and hope this has renewed the momentum to come up with a creative solution in order to keep providing service or find an alternative option.”
Schott-Bresler said if Whatcom County commits to reimbursing the occasional mutual aid call-out to recreation areas, especially when the county is managing a tight budget, it could set a precedent that other fire districts may want to pursue.
But the county and the fire authority do agree that neither wants emergency response to end.
“It’s wonderful they’ve been doing it for this long,” Schott-Bresler said about SWFA. “No one wants to go into summer mountain bike season without a resolution.”
Julia Tellman writes about civic issues and anything else that happens to cross her desk; contact her at juliatellman@cascadiadaily.com.
